ATM is a smaller budget horror movie that seems to have pinned its hopes on making all the money back on this little pre-release. To the film's credit it's kind of original: After leaving an office Christmas party two best friends and a girl that one of them really likes have to stop at an ATM. In a spectacular showing of their collective genius they stop at a small ATM machine building, (you may never have seen one but you swipe your card to get into a little glass room with two ATMs in it and usually a table to write checks. ) and are immediately approached by a mysterious hooded man who shows his dominance by beating a hobo to death.
From then on it's pretty much that "Saw-like" plot of crazy mystery murderer man torturing these three young whipper snappers as they slowly freeze to death trying to find a way out and to get help. Some of what it does is original and kinda interesting, and even has some decent cheap acting by none other than Josh Peck of Drake & Josh fame. All and all it's not a bad cheap thriller, but an ambiguous ending and a lack of any non-standard characters growth make this, in my professional opinion, not worth ten bucks.
Probably a D+ and a frowny face :(
The Hunter, starring Willam Defoe, on the other hand isn't a cheap and lifeless thriller. Plot summery-a-go-go; Willam Defoe is a hunter who's specializes in tracking rare animals for well playing clients. Is it legal?
...maaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyybe. He gets a job to hunt an animal called the Tasmanian Tiger which most people believe is extinct but a few people have claimed to have seen very recently in a rural part of what I think is Australia (but who knows?) and begins a journey that will emotionally affect him and his family forever!
How sweet is that? ....wait, wait, wait i'm sorry that's not what happens, i must be mistaken. He spends a lot of time alone in the woods setting traps and ripping animals guts out trying to set lure in the tiger. And then he goes back to his house?
Oh ya! That's what i was talking about before, ya ya now i got it. For some reason his living arrangements find him in the house of a researcher and his family. Sadly the researcher has been missing for sometime after he went off looking for the same mystery tiger. He and the family have a few moments and he spends a lot of time bonding with the kids and helping the mother readjust, and that's all well and good and dandy. Come to think of it this film does an excellent job of shifting the tone between Defoe with the kids and Defoe alone in the woods. It makes the scenes with the family more affecting and real, while the scenes of him tracking a myth in the woods very tense and serious.
It's a cool effin movie and you probably won't see anything this original or realistic for a while. Defoe is a massive talent and shines in this role as a semi- legal poacher that's supremely focused on his work almost to a fault. Shots of the beautiful landscape aboslutely astonish your eyeballs, and the movie keeps twisting and twisting till it needs a breaking point.
I hope you enjoy it as much as i do, B+
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